The basis of this new double LP, ATGCLVLSSCAP, comes from a dozen shows the band performed in early 2014, not long after the unit had issued its postmodern requiem mass Messe I.X-VI.X. The material here is the result of the group improvising in the live setting, blending the dark electronic elements that it has become known for with traces of the psychedelic, dashes of minimalism and rhythms that sway somewhere between Scandinavian primacy and ornate Latin temples to movement and time. Now placed side-by-side the pieces form two possible interpretations: the first of which is an album that evolves with a tension and release strategy in its sequence or a composition with 12 chambers that take the listener through all the same movements and emotions of a well-wrought symphony.

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course. [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments

Muslimgauze was the sound of an angry Middle East, a prolific source of music dark, spacious and smothering. Tension was a constant theme not only in the music but in the packaging. (For example, Betrayal shows the hands of Yassir Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, and guns, knives, and news photos of an Arab world at war were a common motif in titles and sleeve art.) However, the music wasn't the usual agitprop fare: Music meant to rile a public to a cause isn't normally pigeonholed as ambient, electronica or musique concrete. But the band, hidden from public view, was rumored to donate proceeds to Palestinian terrorists, and that they were eventually silenced by Mossad.
Despite the prodigious output -- issuing almost a hundred EPs and albums between 1983 and 1998, over a hundred more since -- limited distribution and perpetual obscurity ensured the rumors were easier to find than the music. While the facts about Muslimgauze have little in common with the fictions, they are, if anything, stranger... [more inside]
posted by ardgedee
on Dec 22, 2008 -
48 comments

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